1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to display of information, and more particularly to a method of forming a priority sequence of pieces of information so that the pieces of information may be accessed using a line configured on a display screen. Such information display may be useful for multiple applications involving display of information, including platform management in heterogeneous systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
The following descriptions and examples are not admitted to be prior art by virtue of their inclusion within this section.
Continual advances in software and hardware technology have led to a proliferation of available information-based, or information-handling, devices, including computers, telephones, pagers, and personal digital assistants (PDA's). Such devices are increasingly configured with the ability to interact and communicate with one another. For example, electronic mail may currently be sent to some wireless telephones and pagers, and PDA's may be used to access some Internet (also called “World Wide Web” or “web”) sites.
Information-handling devices such as those described above generally include display screens for presentation of information to the user. The trend in size of these display screens depends on whether the device is fixed or portable. For example, displays associated with desktop computers are generally getting larger, to provide ease of viewing and/or accommodate increasingly complex applications and operating systems. On the other hand, displays associated with portable devices such as wireless telephones and PDA's are small and often getting smaller, to enhance, e.g., portability and battery life. A severe mismatch between the display sizes of two devices communicating with one another may result from these differing trends.
For a situation in which a device, such as a desktop computer, which is normally configured for a large display transmits information to a device having a small display, this mismatch in display size may be particularly troublesome. Because all of the information viewable on the large display will not fit on the small display, a procedure for sending a manageable amount of information to the small display must be used. For example, the information normally shown on the large display may be divided into portions and sent to the small display sequentially, or some of the information may simply be removed from the information sent to the small display.
Both of these procedures may be disadvantageous for the user of the small display. If some of the information normally shown on a large display is not sent to the small display at all then clearly the user may be denied access to a desired piece of information, and the device having the small display does not provide true access to the information of the large-display device. If the information is instead sent in sequential portions, multiple downloads to the small-display device may be needed before a desired piece of information can be viewed on the small display. Furthermore, pieces of information which are best viewed together may be divided between different portions and shown on the small display at different times.
As an example of interaction between small-display and large-display devices, a system administrator for a computer system or network may connect remotely to a system terminal using, for example, a telephone or PDA. The system terminal typically has a large display screen, facilitating rapid access to the values of system or network variables such as transaction rates, application program status, and disk space availability using, for example, a graphical user interface (GUI). If the system administrator contacts the system terminal remotely in response to notification of a problem with the system or network, there is generally a specific set of variables which the system administrator must observe in order to properly diagnose and/or correct the problem. If some or all of these variables are not sent to the small-display device used by the system administrator until after several other pieces of information are sent, valuable time may be wasted. Furthermore, if the variables relevant to the problem at hand are not displayed together on the small-display device, or at least in close succession, obtaining the needed information may be significantly more difficult and time-consuming than when a large display is used.
In addition to the above-described problems of obtaining specific desired information quickly and efficiently, there are other problems associated with the use of small-display devices. In addition to the limitations imposed by a small display in receiving information from another device, for example, there may be severe limitations in simply displaying the options and/or commands typically used for operation of an application program. For example, the toolbars and pulldown menus used in a typical electronic mail management program generally take up so much screen space that they cannot all be used on a small-display device if any space for actual message display is to be retained. Some of the ways in which options and commands are presented, such as pull-down and pop-up menus, may also be relatively slow and inconvenient to use for selection of a particular option or command. In the case of a pull-down menu, for example, a user must typically use a pointing device to “click” on a word at the top of a menu column. The column below the selected word is then displayed, and the user then typically moves the pointing device along the column to the desired command, and clicks again (alternatively, a pointing device button may be held down after the first click and released to select the desired command). Such a selection sequence can be tedious on any display, and particularly so on a small-display device which may have a somewhat smaller and more awkward pointing device than is typically used with a large display.
It would therefore be desirable to develop a method by which the most relevant pieces of information may be efficiently delivered to users of information-based devices having displays of arbitrary size. It would further be desirable to develop a method by which display of information, options or commands could be done using a minimum amount of screen space. Such a display method would preferably allow simple, rapid selection of displayed material.